Sunday, July 10, 2011

Bite marks and corn

Unfortunately she was too gross to even try catching so I gave up singing in favour of cleaning her off.

While I was scrubbing lunch off of her I noticed that she had several bug bites—a couple on her face, a couple on her arms.

"Where'd you get all these bug bites?" I asked.

"Rachel. Bite. Meme!" said Meme.

Rachel, who had been putting away the dishes so nicely,* wheeled around and glared at Miriam. Her previously pleasant demeanor had vanished.

"I did not bite you!" Rachel fumed. "Do you even know how many times I didn't bite you? Many times."

Apparently Rachel has to restrain herself from biting Miriam more often than she's been letting on. Fortunately I could prove her innocence because the bite marks on Miriam's arms and face simply do not match Rachel's teeth.

Last night we had corn on the cob with dinner. Rachel thought eating corn on the cob was going to be a lot of fun and quickly grabbed (half) an ear for herself. Miriam got the other half. I really didn't think she'd be able to eat it but she totally went to town. She devoured that thing—every kernel of corn was gone when she was through. And then she moved onto Rachel's half (because Rachel found eating corn on the cob to be more trouble than it was worth, I guess, since she only took a few bites before setting it aside) and devoured that piece, too.

Later that night we had some friends over and Miriam was having trouble going to bed (it's kind of a theme lately). She was giving me the runaround.

"Do you want Blankey or Pinky?"** I asked.

"No," said Meme.

"Do you want icy cold water?" I asked. (My friend Sara once told me that her kids would do anything for ice water; turns out my kids will, too.)

"No," said Meme. (Well, at least it works some of the time.)

"Do you want baby Dora?"

"No!"

"Do you want baby Nora?" (Miriam has named one of her dolls Nora after Rachel's doll Nora; yes, it gets confusing: Nora, Nora, and Dora.)

"No!"

"Do you want music?"

"No!"

"Well, what do you want?"

"Snack."

This time it was my turn to say, "No."

"Potty."

"We already went potty. Twice."

"Corn."

"What? You want corn?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, here's the deal: If you go to sleep now then in the morning we can call Naanii and ask her if she has any corn in her freezer because I know we're all out of corn in this house. But you have to go to sleep soon so that tomorrow comes otherwise we'll never be able to call Naanii."

"Naanii's corn?"

"Yeah. If you go to sleep we'll ask Naanii for corn. Deal?"

"'Kay. Deal."

I still have yet to keep my end of the bargain on this one but the day is young. The beautiful thing is that it actually worked. My child slept for corn. And that meant that I was free to enjoy the evening playing games and chatting with friends (which was nice because we haven't done that in forever).

* Seriously, so nicely; the same thing happened this morning when I asked her to brush her hair—she just started doing it; have I died and gone to heaven?** The blanket I crocheted for her is called Blankey. The blanket Grandma Sharon made for her is called Pinky; it's pink on one side, obviously.

3 comments:

Good thing the corn thing worked out. My kids mostly just respond to my "if you get out of bed for anything other than going to the bathroom or getting a SMALL drink of water, I get to take a toy away." It works every time.